the heart map home

If you don’t know where you belong but have a sense of belonging, as I do, then is that enough of a place? I’m sometimes lost and looking for a community while all around it seems that there are people I know with families and children and grandchildren or if not that then places they visit with friends and stay a while. Then there’s me. Working. Sometimes saying I’m a working fool. But what I mean depends upon the day and how many stories I hear from all these people that are in different orbits than me. 

I sometimes feel as if I am spinning around my small life and everyone else is having a larger life. Relaxing more, communing more. All the things I long for and don’t seem to have in abundance. I could feel as if I did a bad job of making a life but the truth is different. Well, that’s the thing about truth, it is always different. It’s always different and it is what it is. 

I might feel as if everyone owns gravity and I’m just free floating. I have a friend that sees me this way. I think she does. Here I am free as can be and there she is saddled with her life and not feeling free. Now, I find that funny in a bittersweet kind of way because I see her as having a very full life; filled with people, children, relatives and friends too. Community involvement. Accomplishments in all important areas. She’s a great parent. I see her as belonging. And sometimes I see myself as someone that bounces against the earth’s atmosphere trying to get in. But then again, there are days I feel so much a part of everyone and everything, that my heart is full and joy wells up inside of me. I hardly know what to do with this sense of fullness. 

Why there are days that I feel so empty and alone; so out of it; and questioning why this and why that, I don’t know. How do some of the people I know manage to find so many spaces in their lives for great community activities and belonging? I have always been aware of the word ‘longing’ in belonging. A lot more than I’d wish. But then I have also felt belonging and I can hear in my friends that have all these places to go to and family and community the same things I feel on those days I feel alone. It is a strange thing and a wonder to me. 

Right now everything is good. I went through several layers of regret and envy and come to this moment where I feel perfect. I feel held by the world. I am even smiling at how often I get caught up in feeling that it’s a bit grandiose to say I feel held by the world but if I said I feel as though I belong to the earth that would also sound quite grand. And what I really mean is that I feel so lucky to have this feeling and to be safe here in the screen house hanging with Molly and writing this and knowing that as much as these friends of mine aren’t a deep and integrated part of my life as I used to wish for when I wished for community, they are that too. They are a part of my wider community.  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. wrote about karass and granfalloon. Sometimes the same people can be both in your karass, your intimate soul community and they might sometimes also fit into your granfalloon or the group that you belong to.

On the days or in the hours I might feel alone I’ll find myself wondering if it’s because of choices I made; choices about how to relate to people and family. Or if I was not given instructions on how to create and hold the structure of family. More often than not I have found myself trying to reenter the earth’s atmosphere after realizing that the search for my karass was really closer to my home than I realized.  Whether it was a happy accident or not, I had a home. A solid community too.  Not as large as many I know but real. The truth, ever true but always evolving, is that deep connections, soul friends or family relationships are always evolving. 

If you were the person in charge of keeping the planets and stars in relationship to each other; dealing with forces like solar winds, gravity, magnetic pulls and stellar winds, can you imagine the magnificent talents it would take to keep everything in orbit and keeping a safe but relational distance? 

What we bring from our adventures with people and places, from the changing landscapes of our relationships and the unfamiliar places in our heart that, when we are brought to them, and remember that we were there once before, is a sense of connection. Some people I’m fortunate enough to know, and they are in my karass, bring me a real and live sense of what it’s like to feel belonging. To have your self and your sense of life deepened and heightened by these encounters is joy. It’s love. It’s a sweetness that touches you in all the spaces that felt empty. Today was quite a journey. It’s quite possible every day is a journey and I’m just not aware of the itinerary. But today was something special for me because I came home in several ways. When the world unfolds itself so that you can see all the layers and be a part of so many different places; and belong to all of them and recognize that they are always there but not all the time, that is treasure. That’s the pirate treasure I wanted as a kid. I still don’t have the map leading me there. But some of the elements that I know how to gather or become a part of help point me in the right direction. At least every now and then. 

More about resilience is available at the wild blue on Kindle at   http://amzn.to/13RKQ2i.

The mythical journey of the modern Odysseus is found at Conversations with Nic available at http://amzn.to/14jUNUs.

Compassion with ya

I would like to be tethered by the idea that you travel together in groups or communities like a field of flowers blossoming together in the spring.  People so often feel alone and feel the pain of this aloneness because being solitary and being human seems to be incompatible estates.  Our friends and family, if we have any of each, would feel different without our presence.  Without you, all is different.  This idea is also a feeling that holidays and other notable days, both public and private, bring home in a swift and relevant way, often when we are not looking for it.

If you are taken by surprise by feelings of isolation and aloneness, you are being kidnapped and should report it to any person you are close to or feel close to. Short of that, remember that compassion toward yourself is an understanding that you are also accepting yourself as part of the human family and not isolating your particular instance of humanity from the rest of the folks that populate your world. You probably have to be reminded of that because it seems that people growing up in this culture, and growing at various rates and in different time zones means that you are at various life stages at various times with many instances of overlap and re-occurring growing. This means that you are young and old and in your teenager phase at the most inopportune times or these stages are cohabiting with your infant and mature stages while you think you're just riding along on the linear clock that is your life Monday through Friday. We all know that much as we like to believe we're in the flow, we are segmented creatures of time and cannot help but distinguish who we are on the weekends from our Monday through Friday selves. If you can, count yourself a rare bird.

For the rest of us that are humans and not rare birds - it is compassion for others, that ability to suffer along with someone, to be in their difficulty and their pain with them, in your heart, in your imagination, in your real and virtual body and mind, that is the soul of compassion.  What lies at the root of compassion is the notion that you can also suffer along with yourself, you can lift the burden of your pain by being kind to your self. Compassion, to suffer with, is a way toward easing the shoulds and should nots that crowd your head and leave so little room for joy and focus.  Your compassion toward others, your ability to see another's pain and be there with them in some way that tries to lift their pain, to ease their burden and let them know that they are not so alone, is a kindness that we rarely afford ourselves.  Why we have to be reminded to be good to ourselves?  The myriad ways our inner negatives supplant our natural joys.  But once you identify the beasts of your inner burdens you can share the wealth of heart and soul you have with yourself. Nobody can see that you're doing this. It's totally discreet, inside, protected and safe.  Melville referred to an "insular Tahiti", a place in the mind that was secluded but also healing and free from the messed up miseries that you or the world might want to pile on your head.

If you're an inland person and not on an island or near a body of water or the shore than an "insular Tahiti" might be the perfect solution to your need for renewal and contact with that part of yourself that is easy on your soul and a Bodhisattva of kindness.  Compassion isn't just something you leave to others or give away. You can hold yourself within the embrace of compassion and if need be thank another for the peace you deserve.